THE IDEA

Race Your Heart Out — The First-Ever Periscope Powered Race

A socially driven live slot car race powered by Twitter’s Periscope.

Participants of the live event controlled acceleration remotely with their smart phones by pressing the Periscope “heart” button to power the racing Acura TLXs around the track. Ryan Eversley, Acura factory racecar driver, served as part of the event’s commentary team and, in spirit of the holidays, Acura donated race winnings to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.

THE WORK

And how it was done…

With a bit of smoke and mirrors, I created a web app with socket.io and an express server that would communicate to the web overlays what should be viewed. For example, should the HUD be on or off for Car A? When a race is over show the leader board on both cars. Update all the HUD display properties: hearts per hour, number of laps made, elapsed time, etc. The web browser would capture the video of the car, and a device would capture the screen (in this case a MBP) and stream that composite to Periscope!

The Tech

Loading up the toolbox

Since there was no need to support multiple browsers, I recommended chrome. Socket.io was used to communicate to the apps. On the server-side, NodeJS and Express were used. SCSS was used for styling up the huds and HTML5 for grabbing the video from the computer.

Discovery & Pride

One thing the team and I knew we had to account for was the number of hearts being clicked for speed. Creating real-time averages of hearts per X time and then using that as the basis for speed. There were a few times the car went from zero to superspeed resulting in flying of the track! Even planning for this was a challenge when working with real-time data.